Daniel Radcliffe Recalls ‘Weeping’ During Final ‘Harry Potter’ Shoot

It began in October 2000. Some 3,500 days later, “Harry Potter” was no more.

Wrapping production on the final part of “Deathly Hallows” two weekends ago, the boy-wizard film franchise came to a close after shooting eight installments. Daniel Radcliffe and his co-stars grew up at Leavesden Film Studios outside London, where the majority of each film was shot.

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That final day of shooting, then, was an emotional experience for the entire cast and crew, even if Radcliffe didn’t think he’d succumb to the poignancy of the moment.

“I didn’t expect myself to get particularly emotional, but I really did, as I’m sure you’ll see on the DVD extras, because we were filmed weeping like children,” he told MTV News.

Radcliffe made it through most of the day without breaking down, until he was approached by producers David Heyman and David Barron before the penultimate shot.

“They came up and said, ‘How are you feeling? How are you doing?’ ” Radcliffe said. “And I couldn’t find any words, and I just said, ‘I just want you to know, I’ve had a really nice time.’ And it was such a young, quite innocent, sweet thing to say, that I kind of caught myself off guard. That was the moment when I suddenly had a lump in my throat and was like, ‘OK, I’m really going to have to struggle to keep it together on the last shot,’ which was a stunt, very simple, just jumping and rolling onto a map.”

Radcliffe made it through the rest of the shoot — “They said, ‘That’s a wrap.’ It just felt weird,” he recalled — but had to jet off to New York at the end of the day to be a presenter at the Tony Awards. That meant he didn’t get to go out with the cast and crew on the day they finally finished off the “Potter” series.

“That wasn’t the official wrap party,” Radcliffe said. “That was just everybody going out and getting crazy drunk. The wrap party we’ll have will be sometime in the next two weeks, which will be exciting.”